Our Hands Are Your Hands. Give With Us.

Some Don’t Smile

As cute as he looks with his hat, there is a blank stare in spite of my best efforts to engage this young boy. This is silent suffering.

One of the things Stacy and I will be focusing on for three months beginning in April, is child health assessments. For example, we’ll be checking hemoglobins to get some idea of their nutritional status.

I’ve developed my own custom app for our iPhones where we can plot weights, heights, head sizes, mid-upper arm circumferences, and such. We will begin to track the people of Onaville in and around the Green Churches.

Espwa Means Hope

Baby Jamesly came to the Espwa Malnutrition Center with a hemoglobin of 6 and a hematocrit of 21. He was 4 1/2 months old. Despite all their efforts in Haiti and our efforts here in Georgia, he passed away.

The last guidelines for treating severe acute malnutrition were written by the World Health Organization in 1980. It provides cookbook style instructions for treating these children, but little understanding of how to prevent them dying.

The most crucial phase is in the first five or so days. Refeeding these children can severely lower their calcium and phosphate levels to the point they die of cardia arrest. We are purchasing portable lab equipment that will help is determine critical labs at the bedside. We want to write new guidelines based on the best understanding of the biochemical changes that kill these precious children.

Onaville, February 2018

Malnutrition and Premature Death

These hand and foot prints are baby Rosena’s, born at 32 weeks. She died of necrotizing enterocolitis.

You can make a difference too. Come and serve in one of the mobile medical clinics…no medical training required!

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Help Us Teach Sewing

How does teaching sewing help prevent malnutrition and starvation? If we give these wonderful people skills then we they will be able to earn the living that will feed their families.

Pastor Noel’s vision is not to make his people dependent on handouts, but create the means to live using their own hands. The food, water, and trade resources he envisions for them will ultimately spread the Gospel and give people a hope.

About Me

I was 19 and Stacy 20 when we married. I was already a junior at Henderson State University a small Arkansas state college. By age 21, I had graduated with a BA in Chemistry and started medical school at UAMS in Little Rock.

From graduation at 25, we moved to Tulsa, where I spent three years in the OU Tulsa Medical College Pediatrics residency program. Andrea was born there. In my first practice in south Arkansas, Laura was born.Our lives changed dramatically because she had severe fetal isotretinoin embryopathy. Stacy and I lost Laura in 2012 at age 24.

Andrea had married a few years prior. She and Eric live a few miles from us in Senoia, Georgia with our four grandchildren, Harrison, Bennett, Emmaline, and Adelle. Stacy and I will celebrate 37 years of marriage this December.

A Mere Christian is dedicated to Andrea and Laura. I love you girls so very much!

Ron Smith, MD, April 2014

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I am a steward of the information that I provide here on A Mere Christian. I have a calling to teach, and it clearly states in James 3:1 that teachers are held with a greater responsibility. We are called to the highest standards.

James 3:1Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.

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